Arryism

The Ashcan School

2007-12-30T11:00:00.001-08:00

There are certain works of art, philosophical concepts, historical periods, and ways of looking at the world that I return to periodically with undiminished fascination.

One of the lights in my life - a street lamp lighting the way - is the work of the "Ashcan" artists. Beyond an intense interest (as if returning to the homeland or the bosom of the family) that I can hardly explain, the artwork of the Ashcan school embodies a way of seeing that I believe is instructive in how to live; or, at least, it evokes questions that are important to ask.

The Ashcan artists were largely equivalent with the early "naturalist" writers in the United States -- Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, and so on. They depicted mostly urban life in a manner consciously devoid of artifice and found living and breathing tissue in the details of the streets, in loneliness, in standing in the rain...waiting, walking solitary among the crowds, moving in the grimy alleys and sidewalks in the shadows of dark buildings, staring alone at the turbulent harbor -- in a city where there was wilderness not long before and where the loneliness of life distilled to the five senses permeated and transformed the physical place itself.

John Sloan, my favorite of the group, found palpable urban vitality in the "drab, shabby, happy, sad human life."

The questions (some are ancient questions) that pose themselves are: Is the real and true always beautiful?; Is living in the moment a door into perception?; Were the artists exulting in the reality of poverty and the fringes (only partially and confusedly assimilated) of a compulsive commercial culture?; Were they producing works of art offering the possibility of living fully in the moment as we must live to kindle the fire necessary to face the realities of the world?

Across the Fire

2007-12-29T19:00:00.000-08:00

This blog, as you may have surmised, is a matter of gathering fragments that may be useful in sustaining us in what we are beginning to encounter. Yes, I believe climate change will bring about global social and economic collapse. Ross Gelbspan has been writing about climate change (specifically global warming) for a few years. He has proposed and advocated solutions to the problem, but now he and others are recognizing the disaster we are facing.

Interestingly, and probably inevitably, Mr. Gelbspan came to the conclusion that environmental and social collapse will certainly happen at very much the same time I realized that we are fooling ourselves to hope for another future. I imagine many others reached the inevitable judgment at approximately the same time as a result of seeing progressively accumulating results of scientific research coupled with the always astonishing extremes of irrationality that many people - possibly most people - will embrace in order to blind themselves to frightening facts.

Arryism is my little project to break through the prisons of mind and spirit, to filter the medium of life into its essential and true elements, elements that are necessary to the moral soul facing disaster and even death (always, with a slight turning,...life).

Arryism will continue, but I am beginning another blog which I call "Across the Fire". It has no content yet, but its purpose will be to analyze and gather the practical means with which to encounter what will appear to us to be violent and dispiriting chaos. We have to start talking about these things and create a cadre of courage, of heart, of intelligence that will lead and move inexorably "across the fire".

I didn't want to reach these conclusions or lead a life incessantly burdened by them, but I can't escape the evidence or look the other way. To me, that blindness would be no life at all. Can we create a community of consciousness and courage that will not wither before chaos but will gather strength to live or die?

Time / Act

2007-12-28T20:36:00.000-08:00

I have thought for many years that much of the ineffectiveness, violence, and lost quality of modern life has to do with the inability of people to live with their selves within time or evolving reality. Their relationship with the evolving world is crude, stuck, confused. They are unable to appropriately act at the appropriate time. They are uncomfortable inorganic foreign bodies in an organic and elegant medium.

The wheels of the day, the month, the seasons were of vital and conscious importance in the lives of those who lived in a closer spiritual proximity to the earth, but we stand like frightened and impotent idiots trying to figure out what to do. When we act, the effort is derived from a source of authority (the ego?) that has no experience in being a part of the movement and relations of the day, the month, the seasons, the year; so the act is usually destructive. Evolving reality in the medium of time is all there is.

Freedom is impossible under such conditions. Life itself diminished and slowly dies.

True and Only Heaven

2007-12-19T08:44:00.000-08:00

The picture I posted in the last entry was taken about 1966 or 1967. Today, the lushness and health of the forest has diminished significantly due, I believe, to the early (but rapidly accumulating) effects of global warming. The forest is slowly dying.

The meadow in the distance now contains the "estates" of a number of investment bankers, insurance executives, computer entrepreneurs, and the usual wanabees.

Beyond the left side of the picture is a state highway and a Wal-Mart.

When I was there a few years ago, everybody was wired into the grid. It was almost comical to go into a grocery store and hear people apparently talking to themselves whatever aisle I looked down. Of course, they were on their "cells".

How long until we reach the shining city, the true and only heaven?

Random thoughts / seeds

2007-12-18T21:35:00.000-08:00

Random thoughts (because I can't seem to get it together blogwise, although I have do have some objectives here.)

-- Someplace I read that modern culture - I mean especially from the mid-1600's on - has been characterized by the notion that "If it moves, subdue it or kill it." In other words, everything must be in its place in the grand system or it must be forcibly put in its place - dead or alive. The point is to see the design - scientific, industrial, economic - and prevent the pesky critters of actual life from messing up the vision. The trouble is, eventually everything is in its place and dead.

-- The three horsemen of the apocalypse are greed, hypocrisy, and willful blindness. Separate, they can be isolated and controlled. Together they are a malignant cancer.

-- There is a kind of zen spirit in American work. Not so much anymore, perhaps, but in American tradition and still powerful below the surface. The mechanic, the rancher, the farmer - iconic figures of awe based on their ability to live in the moment, in their work. So, here we have tactile living-in-the-moment (the essence of life in most wisdom philosophy) that could be useful in building a culture able to sustain itself but that is unconscious of the larger world and often an end in itself (which, paradoxically considering its basis in how to live, can be and is often deadly.)

-- Above is an old b&w picture taken from the "old wagon trail" near where I lived and grew up in Colorado. No place of earth means more to me. Whatever I say or do contains that place.

Breath of life

2007-12-09T20:26:00.000-08:00

Sidney Pollard stated in 1986 that "the only possible alternative to the belief in progress would be total despair."

Yet, is it not true that the core of modern sensibility is despair at the sense of impermanence, that "all that is solid melts into air"? There is no story, no ending. Suicide itself has a certain appeal. It satisfies the sense of ending, the confirmation that there was a story with a beginning middle and end.

[I believe I detect an impulse toward suicide in much of the deadly irrational view of "free market capitalism" which has become notable mainly for a free-fall over the cliff to planetary suicide and death of the soul (which is the death of human existence).]

Nevertheless, the sense of floating in a meaningless cloud and having no sense of time (largely because we believe the deception that we are exempt from the judgment of time) and that there is nothing to grasp other than the ephemeral and unsatisfying sensations designed by those who gain most from the "rehabilitation of desire", is general in our culture - an increasingly global culture - and we miss a question that was always on the mind of our ancestors, "How should nations conduct themselves under sentence of death?" How often is this question pondered particularly as we are facing catastrophic global climate change? The theories and propaganda of progress have made us less than men, less than women and blind to primary questions, let alone realities, unable to gaze directly into the void or to stand up in the world.

Christopher Lasch has an interesting historical perspective on the matter. It was the "moral rehabilitation of desire" that opened the way to unsatiable appetites and fueled the commercial engine. "Human needs came to be seen not as natural but as historical - hence unsatiable." But human needs are natural, so we are off on a very rugged and blind path.

"Private vices became public virtues." Isn't it clear why the worldview of progress is irrational and how rationality itself rises from the earth and is enfolded in the human soul? I will add to Lasch's comment and say, "Private irrationality became public rationality", a condition that is in itself irrational and destructive of the soul. (I hope I will make it clear in subsequent postings why I think the "soul" is a useful concept and how I specifically define it. Suffice it to say for now that it consists of the palpable relations of humans to the earth, physical and biological evolution, and the inner/outer relationship that constitutes existence. It is deeply and essentially rational.)

So, we find it difficult or impossible to conceive of full realities and of the milestones of time as we stew in an irrational and existential cage. At the very time we need to embrace the ancient virtues, our character is lacking and we find ourselves unable to fully picture our situation with any clarity or strength of mind or to face it heroically or tragically - "incapable of defending or revenging ourselves."

Shock Doctrine

2007-12-03T13:34:00.000-08:00

My plan was to begin closely analyzing the "alternate tradition" from many angles, and I hoped to post a wide-angle piece last week to get started, but I'm reading Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" and can't put it down (exclusive of the fact that I need to get it back to the library by Wednesday where there is a long waiting list for it. )

I concur with what seemed to be progressive hype. It is a magnificent book in terms of subject (of utmost importance) and fine, in-depth journalism.

It documents the mainstream tradition of progress gone utterly irrational and stupidly rapturous, the driving force of which is an unshakable conviction that the power of elite corporatism (they call it "free market capitalism") is the ultimate goal of history and is good (they saw it and "it was good"); so good, in fact, that it must displace all other ways of life by whatever means possible. (Shock and violence have proven effective.)

When hypocrisy is accepted and out-of-control, it is amazing what people can believe and do.

From the perspective of another tradition, the feverish "fun" that the power elite is having looks like destructive childishness and desperation, and the whole edifice of skyscapers, beach resorts, five-star hotels, and private jets appears as a horde of glittering junk gathered by crass and cloddish barbarians.

Purpose

2007-11-24T17:15:00.000-08:00

Here are my central interests in case you run across this blog and wonder what it is about. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the following concepts are the fields that energize and organize what would otherwise be pictures and thoughts without context.

--- Exploration of an alternative world view...alternative to the dominant irrational and destructive paradigm of "progress" elucidated in liberalism, neo-liberalism, conservatism, and neo-conservatism. A start in the exploration of the alternate tradition would be Christopher Lasch's book "The True and Only Heaven", but the subject is wider and resonates further than he imagined.

--- Identification of points of halting, where (conscious or not) the human spirit says, "Stop." It is akin to the Sufi concept of halting, where there is a break in the stream of unconscious life and activity, allowing an "alternative" (shall we say true?) light to enter. These points are common and usually not recognized, but recognition is essential.

--- Getting over or through the wall. This is the practical problem of those of us living at this time. A crowd of people are pushed up, huddled against a wall continually pressured from behind as more people try to get through. But the wall is adamant and everyone is getting tired and angry and confused and depressed and can hardly breathe. That's our culture and our world. We need to get through.

Projective verse

2007-11-18T20:20:00.000-08:00

(See "Hidden consciousness" below.) The first example of a cultural antibody is one of which some readers may exclaim, "Why projective verse? Isn't its impact rather slight in the overall culture, and isn't it a form of disengagement with necessary political life, and didn't Charles Olson, whose essay of 1950 (pdf) defined it, say humans (at least poets) should be "objects"? Isn't that the opposite of humans as humans?"

Well, it is a good example because it requires a broad and discerning view of the emanating life-force and how it manifests itself in a specific case that could be confused by language. It is out there like a gem (or, shall we say, some sort of manifest entity) and not very dispersed into the surrounding pollution.

What is the source, the ground of projective verse?

Here are some of the key concepts:

-- Projective verse is supposedly "open" as opposed to "closed" verse of tradition.

-- Writing projective verse is described as "composition by field", not, it is assumed, by memory or learned and cultural processes of creativity.

-- Olson would have poets be "attentive" ("don't go lazy") to "pressure of breath" and listen to the sounds of words, even to the point of recognizing and using the "percussive" qualities of syllables.

-- One should be attuned to objects - attentive to objects --- solid objects unburdened by preconceptions.

-- The line will follow the law of the "field".

-- The poet should be an object among objects, and, as such, be of "use".

The first unexamined reaction to the principles of projective verse may be to say, "The poet as object? Isn't the use of people as objects the principle evil of capitalism and cultural slavery? What about community tradition and values, grown from the earth into a multifaceted entity?"

On examination, however, certain concepts become clear. When Olson is calling for the poet to be an object among objects he is really calling for a clear, unequivocal stance against being partial and false -- a statement of "Here I am" in the cultural wasteland of manipulation and incessant, deadly diversion from life itself. The key is in the concept of "attentiveness".

My thoughts are reinforced by Olson's seemingly strange idea of the likelihood of another "epic" coming about as a result of use of the principles of projective verse, an epic as Homer's works are epics, where the poet is in nature and "nothing is diminished". Everything is diminished in inattentiveness.

So, composition by field, strict attention to the elements (objects) of the field, percussive, syllabic voice dictating the line, the poet "reduced" to object combine to illustrate one of many cultural attempts to break free of the oppression of "how it must be". The trajectory of "how it must be" is killing us, as Romantics (who also looked to Homer and the myths), for example, also recognized on one level of consciousness.

Some may have wondered why certain people make it the work of their lives to examine questions such as those posed by the principles of projective verse and try to write with the principles in mind. I hope I have made it clear that the subjects examined and energy generated by the thought and discussion is derived from a center of utmost seriousness in regard to the present and the future. It is far more than specialists in poetry discussing their craft.

(I myself am not an English specialist. I simply believe it is vitally important to recognize and explore the islands that rise above the surrounding, mostly opaque and unconscious, seas of existence so that we know where to live and work toward life sustenance in our epic struggle.)

The questions and solutions posed by projective verse illustrate something of an attempt - however partially conscious and benighted - to break out of the spiral of death embodied in the main-traveled and unexamined ("inattentiveness") concept of "progress".

[Addendum: It might be interesting to think of Olson's idea of "open" and "closed" poetry in regard to the closed story that is keeping us unconscious as blogged in my "Endgame" posting.]

Hidden consciousness

2007-11-18T11:04:00.000-08:00

Like sources of fresh, stimulating air in a vastly polluted world, various cultural movements arise, excite the senses, and disperse into the general oppression of the world.

They don't arise from nothing. They are the forces of the earth (and, therefore, life) asserting themselves against an oppressive and generally unconscious, though compulsive, dying.

Many are feeble. Some convulse the world. But, in general, a sad characteristic is a blindness toward their practical uses and purposes which make them easy prey for the engulfing vastness of the dying earth.

To be clear: Unbalanced, compulsive energies, usually designated as "progress" but which create conditions fatal to full human life, meaning, and enjoyment and which are clearly destroying the living conditions of the earth -- these unhealthy compulsions have been and are seen for what they are by some perceptive people through the centuries into the present, but a minimal and unexamined knowledge of the stimuli, causes, and nature of the consequent creative reaction has allowed the perceptions to be incomplete and, therefore, easily manipulated and absorbed and put to use by the smothering forces of death.

Being involved in the endgame of culture and the rich, life-giving environment of our evolution, in a game that began, probably, before recorded history but which has taken on the dimensions of a natural disaster in the modern industrial era, it is imperative that those of us engaged in the conscious struggle to find a way out understand and fully perceive the nature of attempts to stem the tide and why they were weak and weakened and were only partially conscious of their causal, practical, and vital nature.

We need to learn.

I hope I will make myself clear in the process of examining specific examples.

Endgame?

2007-09-13T17:02:00.000-07:00

Barry Commoner used to say that technology was a kind of dialectic. That is, technology is developed and put into use. Errors and anomolies are discovered in the process of operation, there is a period of "head scratching" as to why they happened, and then solutions are developed which involves further technological "progress".

The trouble, as Commoner pointed out, is that systems have extensive and even global holds. So, an anomoly can have global implications, even disasterous implications.

For example, if plutonium were released into the earth's atmosphere through a malfunction of a spacecraft or its booster, the next step - studying the problem, brainstorming - would be tangential (to say the least) to the fact that possibly thousands of people and extensive ecosystems would be destroyed. (Scientists calculate the chances of such an occurance, as if any chance is acceptable. Of course, if it happens they may have to re-calculate.)

Recognition of global climate change, largely the effect of petroleum as the basis of industry and economy, is almost an absurd example of the "head scratching" phase. The brainstorming may be null and void if a methane feedback loop develops. "Hmmm" would hardly be the likely response.

In other words, people live their "stories". One powerful story is that science and technology progress logically as part of intellectual mastery when, in fact, they progress only in the closed environment of the "story". Partial understanding and the inability to release comfortable patterns of mind can be deadly, so it seems.

2007-06-20T13:47:00.000-07:00